


Curiosity Did Not Kill The Cat

by SamIAm



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Jossed, Minor Natasha Romanov&Clint Barton, Minor Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, OTTEAM, Science Bros, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-07-09
Packaged: 2017-12-18 05:28:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/876143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SamIAm/pseuds/SamIAm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thor and his friends watch the Curiosity rover land on Mars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Curiosity Did Not Kill The Cat

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Tumblr users Lupinswilly and Grassangel for recounting the landing's livestream and the title, respectively.

_Something_ was going on.

Bruce, Tony, and Jane had all voluntarily emerged from their lab prior to midnight and were now prowling the penthouse’s common rooms, eyes locked to tablets in the case of the latter two, and constantly cooking, in the foremost case. Whenever he finished making something, Bruce would catch the two of them and force them to eat some of his latest concoction while he took over frantically scrolling through web pages and occasionally reporting things about velocities and estimates.

It set Thor on edge, which in turn hurt his gaming performance.

"Jane," he said when she wandered a bit too close to his and Clint’s waving remotes as they battled on the Wii, “has something gone wrong?" If their research had been set back, those three would be insufferable until they had gotten things back on track, and keeping Jane properly fed and rested would be even more difficult.

She flopped down on the couch behind him, not even acknowledging his question. He turned to look at her, worried, and heard Clint press his advantage by brutally murdering Thor’s sprite. “You will pay for this, Barton," he swore, and paused their game. Clint’s yelp of protest finally drew Jane’s attention, and when she looked up, Thor saw she was wearing some of Stark’s tiny headphones. He gestured to his own ears, and she pulled one out. “Yes?"

"Is anything troubling you? Your work?" he asked. "Oh! No, not at all. We’ve sort of…left it off for the day. The Curiosity rover is reaching Mars tonight, and we can’t really focus properly on anything else."

"I see," Thor lied, as he always did when he had no idea what she was referring to and it seemed related to her work. She smiled at him for obliging her and got off the couch to kiss him.

"Jesus, either play or let me go solo, I’m not here to watch you make out," Clint complained, and Thor threw the remote at him without breaking away from Jane. “Caught it," Clint said. Thor's efforts soon went to waste when Jane’s tablet pinged a second later, and she flitted to it. Then she shrieked. “TONY!"

A couple rooms away, her shout was answered by Tony’s yelling “JARVIS!" and he came tearing into the room.

"STREAM IT STREAM IT STREAM IT!" Jane continued shrieking, and Clint added to the cacophony when JARVIS switched off the Wii and pulled a web page up on the screen.

"What the fuck?! I was _actively using that._ "

"Sorry, buddy, but we’re commandeering this room in the name of science," Tony said, and crowded in on the couch with Jane to get a glance at her tablet before remembering the one in his hand. “BRUCE! Get in here, they’ve got the livestream up!"

"I’m stir frying at the moment! Bring me a tablet!"

Tony bounded up and hurried off to comply. Clint and Thor stared after him, then Thor sat down next to Jane and drew her against him. He liked to watch her use tablets, liked to watch her fingers dance with the images.

"Tell me why this is so exciting?" he asked as he started teasing her hair out of the bun she wore while working in the lab. She started lecturing quickly about past Mars missions, words tumbling over each other in her giddiness at recounting scientific advances. The tablet fell to her lap, her obsession with getting every last piece of news as it was released momentarily forgotten.

“Jesus, y'all are off your collective nut, I’m goin’ to bed," Clint said sourly a minute into this spiel, and tossed the remotes into the pile of gaming instruments. He and Tony narrowly avoided running into each other at doorway.

"Whatever, Barton, you’re just missing _history_ in the making," Tony called after him, and ran up behind Jane to get a look at her tablet again. “Oh, that reminds me, I should get Steve in here, he’s already missed way too much of this kind of thing. Did he go to bed already? I’m not letting him sleep through another, hopefully successful, Mars landing. JARVIS?"

"Captain Rogers is reading in his floor’s living room," JARVIS answered, and Tony ran off once again, too energetic to have JARVIS invite him up.

"I’ll tell you more once Cap gets here," Jane promised, and returned to her intense study of anything NASA linked to their Twitter feed. For his part, Thor watched the Curiosity’s livestream as it rocketed towards Mars, marveling at what humans could do with their magics.

Cap, Bruce, and Tony came in together several minutes later, bearing heaps of food. “This is turning into a regular party then," Jane declared, and called Darcy up to join them. They passed the next hour watching the stream, eating, and listening to Jane explain what was going on in each update of @NASA or @MarsCuriosity, with occasional interjections from Tony and Bruce that generally sparked a jargon filled discussion that only they could follow before the doctors remembered they had an audience.

Around midnight, when the space craft stopped receiving instructions from Earth, Tony video-called Pepper over at the California Stark Industries headquarters to rant about how the boosters the rover would be using to slow the descent would be much less efficient than his repulsors.

"Why _aren’t_ you in on this?" Bruce asked, and Tony waved a hand dismissively.

"Don’t want arc power in other people’s hands, especially when they might have people bright enough to reverse engineer it," he said, while Pepper spoke over him about patent law.

"But aren’t you trying to turn the world over to clean energy? Surely it’s going to happen anyway. Have you prepared for the ramifications of that?" Darcy said with a gleam in her eye that Thor recognized and dreaded; he had been on the receiving end of her ethics diatribes before, and fervently hoped that she would never have a chance to discuss the state of Asgardian feminism with Sif, lest both worlds perish in their combined wrath.

This debate turned out to be as forcefully polarizing as it was incomprehensible to Thor, relying heavily on Misgardian politics as it did. He watched in horror as Cap, Bruce, and Darcy banded together against Tony, Jane, and Pepper. Just when he feared it would come to blows, or the Hulk, Natasha walked in tailed by Clint. “Break it up, children. You’re just reacting badly to the stress."

"We prescribe alcohol," Clint said, revealing that he’d brought a bottle of the vodka he and Natasha claimed to enjoy that no one else in the tower could down a single shot of. Tony held up his hands and volunteered to go mix everyone’s drinks as a peace offering, and the conversation returned to its former peaceful and educational topics.

"Hands up, who here wanted to be an astronaut when they grew up?" Bruce asked during a silence. He, Cap, and Jane raised their hands, as did Pepper, still up on the screen. Everyone looked at Tony, surprised. He shrugged.

"The astronauts weren’t the ones making things, it was all remaking in vacuums for them, and I was all about the robots. I was always going to be an engineer. Besides, if I’d wanted to be one, I probably would be. I’ve got the brains and I could build the brawn. Maybe not, though," he said, glancing at the drink in his hand. “Y’gotta stay cleaner than me. Boring." He knocked back the glass. “What about you, Steve? I guess sci-fi had already been invented."

"Yeah. Had no idea it would look like this, though. I used to draw the stuff out on the margins of the books I read. Got my ass handed to me for doing it in a library book once."

When the “seven minutes of terror" started, Jane called Erik Selvig to bawl at him. After an initial bit of yelling, Darcy hushed them so they could all hear the stream. Each celebration of a completed stage by the NASA scientists stacked the resulting tension higher until Natasha and Clint were the only ones left with any sort of composure.

"Would you or _would you_ kill to have their data right now," Tony said to Bruce and Jane when the heatshield separated. They both moaned despairingly at him, Bruce rubbing his hands together faster than Thor had ever seen, Jane clenching his hand in hers.

"How are you even _human_ ," she gasped at Clint and Natasha when NASA regained contact with the rover after several excruciating moments of no feedback when the retrorockets engaged, during which the two of them had relaxed further while everyone else in the room waited with bated breath.

"We’re assassins. Waiting out high stakes that could go terribly wrong is our job," Natasha said, sipping from her shot glass and reclining against Clint’s knee. He smiled down at her and put his hand in her hair to massage her scalp.

At 1:32, the successful landing was confirmed. The euphoria in the penthouse was staggering, considering that none of them had been involved in any way. The NASA control room was filled with people laughing, hugging and exchanging high fives. The Avengers penthouse living room had all of this as well as people screaming exuberant profanities, celebratory alcohol rounds, and best, in Thor’s opinion, a SCIENCE!-high Jane Foster. She pulled him down to kiss him, and he smiled. He loved her passion, her happiness, and her drive to advance her realm. Especially when things went well and the high of it all manifested in _this_ particular way.

"Thor, quit making out with my other favorite physicist, she’s the only one I haven’t gotten a hug from yet. And my girlfriend’s across the country," Tony complained. Jane broke away to give him and Bruce kisses on the cheek, hug Darcy, and scream in Erik’s ear over the phone. Thor caught the Captain in a hug, then watched Clint and Natasha dance giddily.

"This is hardly fair," he told them, “you cannot escape the torment then engage in the celebration."

"Part of being an assassin is reacting suitably when things go as they should," Clint said, dropping Natasha into a back bend.

"We're responding appropriately to the situation," Natasha agreed, coming up and dropping Clint in turn.

"The first thumbnail came through!" Pepper called a few minutes later, and JARVIS blew up the tiny, clear picture of the Martian surface while the NASA reporter exclaimed over how free of dust the image was.

"To motherfuckin’ _science_ ," Tony said, holding up his latest glass, this time holding beer. “We landed Curiosity on Mars!"

"To science!" roared the rest, whether they had a drink to toast with or not.

Jane came back over to Thor and started tugging him towards the door. “Good night, everybody," she said to the room at large. “Don’t stay up too late celebrating, in case this inspires some mad scientist."

"No need to worry about that," said Bruce, engaged with a tablet once again. “All the mad scientists will be up all night trying to download these pictures. I’ll email them to you if _you_ don’t stay up too late celebrating."

She and Thor laughed, and escaped the room. “Earthlings should achieve such things more often," he told her as they headed down to their floor. “It is _very_ fun."

"The fun hasn’t even _started_ yet," she said and tugged his upper body down toward her. Her eyes were wide and happy and completely at odds with the smirk she wore when being seductive, until they closed as she kissed him in such a way that Thor wondered whether they were going to make it out of the elevator.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally posted to Tumblr and edited slightly for publishing.


End file.
